Moving beyond (and back to) the black–white binary: a study of black and white Muslims’ racial positioning in the United States

ABSTRACT

Muslim racialization literature argues that a new racialized group emerged after 9/11, but does not examine how this group is positioned relative to US black–white binary racial logic. In fact, many argue that to understand Muslims, we must move our analysis “beyond black and white”. Literature on the black–white binary, on the other hand, offers valuable theory for analysis of racial structures, but does not often examine the role religion plays in these structures. My project employs and fills gaps in these two literatures by examining how black and white Muslims are positioned relative to US black–white racial logic. Analysing ethnographic data, I find that black and white Muslims are positioned as either black/white or as Muslim. This suggests that Muslimness, and religion more generally, shapes the construction and attribution of blackness and whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Religion
• Muslims
• blackness
• whiteness
• ethnography
• US racial order

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Atiya Husain http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2125-1661

Notes

1. Literature in this area typically uses Michael Omi and Howard Winant's definition of racialization, so it is used in this paper as well: “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (2014, 13).

2. Intersectionality research has highlighted the value of studying groups who have particular identities to understand the meanings each identity carries (Crenshaw 1991).

3. The approach builds on the perspective in the second edition of Omi and Winant's book on racial formation in which they argue that “The US has confronted each racially defined minority with a unique form of despotism and degradation … Native Americans faced genocide, blacks were subjected to racial slavery, Mexicans were invaded and colonized, and Asians faced exclusion” (1994, 1). This quote highlights how racialization occurs through state level shifts primarily, and each group has a particular “moment”. The strength of this perspective is that it allows for analysis of the most salient issues; a weakness is that it gives less attention to relationality. Each group is racialized by major events but also relative to one another since race is relational, meaning that groups who are not directly impacted by a major event are also racialized by it (Molina 2014).

4. The main strength is that it tracks the experiences of these groups. The main limitation stems from questions of who is recognizing whom, and to what end. A focus on inclusion can lead to seeing the black–white binary as a way to study blacks and whites, and other frames for “others”, rather than seeking an integrated framework for racial positioning.

5. This critique rightly ensures that the material power of black–white binary logic does not fall far from consideration in analysis of non-black/non-white groups. The limitation of this critique is that in suggesting that comparisons to blackness are not quite possible due to the uniqueness of blackness, the terms of relational analysis are unclear.

6. Recent estimates of Muslims in the US hold that there are 3.3 million total, or 1 per cent of the US population, of which roughly one-third are black (Pew Research Group 2007; Gallup Center for Muslim Studies 2009; Mohamed 2011). Estimates of the number of white American Muslims today, however, are undermined due to the challenges of defining whiteness and collecting data on religion, which are not on the US Census. Since the vast majority of white American Muslims today are converts, estimates of converts can be a possible way to estimate the relative size of the white Muslim population. According to Pew Research Center, 23 per cent of Muslims in the US are converts. Of US converts, 60 per cent are African-American, and 77 per cent were previously Christian (Pew Research Group 2007). Given these numbers, we can roughly estimate that white Muslims are less than 40 per cent of the total non-African-American convert population, which would make them less than 9 per cent (303,600) of Muslims in the US, which is still a very high estimate. One estimate holds that whites were 22 per cent of mosque-going converts in 2011, and 1 per cent of all mosque attendees (Bagby 2012).

7. In the rest of the article, I use “black” and “African-American” interchangeably to refer to the latter.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ford Foundation.